After every war someone has to tidy up.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAOut of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Something doesn’t start at its usual time. Something doesn’t happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
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Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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It’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
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No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA